Posted
by
Roblimo
on Monday April 10, 2000 @11:00AM
from the who-is-that-masked-man-anyway? dept.

On April 5th you asked Ian Clarke of FreeNet many questions about this new project, which is designed to permit almost totally anonymous Internet posting of almost any kind of material. Here are his answers.

Who is liable?
(Score:5, Interesting)
by tcd004

You said that this: "allows information to be
published and read without fear of
censorship because individual
documents cannot be traced to their
source..."

I'm all for an open forum for free
speech, but this seems almost
reckless. In most venues of speech,
accountability for someone's words is
fundamental. The Internet has opened
up the possiblity of free speech
without accountability to a small
degree, and look at what has
happened. Do you fear any legal
repercussions to your group for
creating this forum based on this
fact?

Ian:

Thanks for your question tcd004. The problem is that it is sometimes
impossible to have free speech unless it can be delivered anonymously,
since the threat of retribution can be a very effective deterrent
against people stating their opinions. I would even go so far as to say
that a forum which forced people to identify themselves was not
permitting true free speech (This is why Slashdot allows "Anonymous
Cowards" to have their say). I should further point out that there is
no
reason that people cannot digitally sign information they place in
Freenet to indicate that they are the authors of a piece of information,
but we don't force people to do that. Someone could even build up an
anonymous reputation by signing all of their work with the same private
key.

My personal feeling is that liable, and liable law, assumes that
people will believe everything they read. This might, to an extent, be
true in this time of centralized media, but my hope is that systems like
Freenet (and indeed SlashDot) will encourage people to make judgments
about the reliability of information themselves rather than relying on a
corruptible centralized source.

Why the name FreeNet? (Score:4, Insightful)
by K8Fan

Maybe I'm just showing my age, but to
me a "FreeNet" is a local free
Picospan/shell account. Maybe it's a
bad idea to take the name of an
existing and quite venerable free
service?

Here is part of the Detroit Freenet
FAQ:

* What is a Free-Net? A Free-Net
is a free, public-access
community computer system.
Free-Nets can serve populations
of any size, from large
metropolitan areas to small
cities and towns. They offer a
wide spectrum of on-line
information services to the
public, including community and
government databases and
worldwide electronic messaging.
They don't charge for their
services, so everything on them
is free. Free-Nets also have an
interactive aspect, in that users
can dialogue with information
providers. While there are many
Free-Nets around the world, each
Free-Net is tailored to meet the
needs of the local community, so
no two Free-Nets are identical.

Seems like the existing Freenet is
already a very good and useful thing,
and it really doesn't need the
confusion.

Ian:

Basically our experience is that while other systems and projects have
used the term "Freenet" in the past, for the most part it had fallen out
of common usage (if you don't believe me just take a look at the current
contents of alt.freenet - which is primarily spam). We believe that
since we are developing a "Free Network", the abbreviation of "Freenet"
is too good not to use, and since it isn't really in common-usage
anywhere else right now, we have resurrected it.

Poisoning the waters (Score:5, Interesting)
by Mike Schiraldi

What protection is there against someone
poisoning the system with malicious
data? For example, let's say
MPAASoftRIAAOL Corp. sets up a system
of computers all over the place with
wildly different IPs, and they feed
either random or specially crafted
bogus data into the system.

This is sort of analogous to renaming
Barry_Manilow.mp3 to
DaveMatthewsBand.mp3 and putting it
on Napster. How do we prevent it?
Some sort of decentralized,
everyone-is-created-equal moderation
system?

Ian:

You raise an interesting point, and one which has created much
discussion on the mailing list since these "cancer" attacks are probably
the most difficult to defend against in any system, particularly if it
is decentralized like Freenet. Right now, the way Freenet works limits
the damage that can be done with such a node, but in the future we plan
to implement mechanisms which will make such an attack even less
effective. Basically Freenet avoids becoming dependent
on any particular node since requests will be spread almost equally
among all Freenet nodes (by the nature of the dynamic caching and
mirroring). This means that even if 0.1% of the total
number of Freenet nodes are corrupted, at most about 0.1-0.4% of
requests will be affected by it.
Right now whenever someone requests
some data in Freenet, in a sense they are voting for it, and all of the
nodes which were involved in retrieving it. This is less than ideal
since you don't actually know what you will get until it is too late
(much like
voting in the real world!). We plan to implement a mechanism to address
this, where you can "undo" your vote if you aren't happy with the
result, and thus Freenet gets a much more accurate idea of the quality
of different types of information, and the quality of the nodes used to
retrieve it. This will mean that a malicious node of the type you
describe will eventually be ignored by the rest of Freenet, so hopefully
the threat you describe won't be an issue when we release Freenet 1.0.

Bandwidth and Piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
by Valdrax

In your own FAQ, you pretty much sidestep the
entire issue that FreeNet would become a humongous
"warez" distribution system by saying that it's
merely a more efficient means of doing what others have
been doing before. Ignoring the seeming subtle
endorsement of piracy through the system, I'll raise an
important question for adminstrators of FreeNet
nodes.

In your FAQ, you say that it is very
hard for FreeNet node admins to know
what is on their site. With the
inevitable proliferation of "warez"
on the site, how will the system
avoid getting bogged down with
hundreds of illegal copies of popular
pieces of software?

For example, when Diablo 2 finally
comes out in the stores, what would
prevent servers from being overloaded
with:

You could literally have hundreds of
650 Mb images of games floating
around jamming up everyone's nodes.
With the lack of searchability, no
one would know what keys hook into
what files. Without this knowledge,
warez people might keep uploading
copies to different keys, thus
flooding the system. In essence, does
not the lack of protection against
piracy and the seemingly intentional
goal of keeping admins from
controlling their system threaten to
bring down the entire network under
the burden of warez and junk?

Ian:

The simple answer is that copyright is economic censorship (ie.
restricting the free distribution of information for economic reasons),
and thus Freenet will make it difficult or impossible to enforce
copyright. As for whether Freenet will be "overloaded" with Warez junk,
well current methods of distributing Warez work fine already, but as for
Freenet - the system will contain whatever information people request.
If
people request Warez, then there will be Warez on Freenet, if they
request pornography, then there will be pornography on Freenet, and if
they request political documents then there will be political documents
on Freenet. Freenet makes no distinction, and if it did it could not
claim to permit true freedom of information. If you want to know more
about why we just might be able to live without copyright take a look at
our
philosophy page.

Regarding your comment about large files clogging up Freenet, right now,
inserting a huge file into Freenet probably won't work, since a node
won't store a file which exceeds its disk-cache limit. We also plan to
make large files need to justify themselves in-terms of the number of
hits they receive, so that they don't displace loads of smaller files.

Why such bad press, what is being done to fix it? (Score:5,
Insightful)
by griffjon

It's pretty scary when Wired slams
you with the headline, "Alternative
Net Protects Pirates", which
contained in the story gems such as:

"Eric Scheirer, a music technology
researcher at MIT's Media Lab, said
Freenet is an interesting experiment,
but said it would likely be used
only by a small community of pirates
and "privacy nuts."

And, failing Monday's piece in the
Nando
Times , that's actually been the
best article so far. The New
Scientist is running "out of
control: The Internet is about to get
even harder to police" in their
current issue,
and ABCNews.com did a
one-paragraph style summary of this
article,
with the lead of "An Internet
system designed to guarantee
anonymous free speech on the Web
could be used by child pornographers
and terrorists, according to New
Scientist magazine," which then
proceeds to all but call you and the
other programmers pedophiles in a
grammatical burp.

My question is, if this is to be
successful (which I for one am all in
favor of, I'm in close contact with
Brandon and Steven, two of the
FreeNet programmers, and am very much
in support of the existence of this),
FreeNet can't come off as a tool for
criminals and miscreants, lest you
attract more attention than you'd
like from the Fed-types. Now, you may
say that because it's open-source and
already available, etc., that the Feds
can't put it down, but if it is
branded as an evil tool for child
pornographers (like it is currently),
it will never gain the popularity and
user-base needed to make it
sufficiently robust against machine
removals.

To get something called a tool for
privacy nuts by Wired is pretty
bad--and the rest of the press has
been worse; is there any plan to get
this project out of the
gutter?

Ian:

Well, we actually have had more good press than you suggest, the recent
Wall Street Journal article was very positive, as was an early Brave GNU
World article (see our
publicity page for links). As for the bad press, well I think
whenever you do something really new you are always going to encounter
resistance. I think most of these journalists were trying to stir up
some controversy, which is what journalists do. Interestingly many of
these journalists have explained that they are often given a brief by
their editors before they have even spoken to me on what tone the
article will have. You rapidly develop a thick skin when you are
involved in this kind of project, although for the most part I have been
reasonably happy with the press coverage we have received.

Re: Why such bad press, what is being done to
fix it (Score:5, Interesting)
by Eric_Scheirer

"Eric Scheirer, a music
technology researcher at
MIT's Media Lab, said
Freenet is an interesting
experiment, but said it
would likely be used only by
a small community of pirates
and 'privacy nuts.'"

I stand by my quote in that
article, although naturally it's
a little short on context. Let
me make clear that I am in favor
of privacy, security, and
anonymity when appropriate, and
I despise the current attempts
to make the WWW more
corporate-controlled via both
code and law. I don't think
there's anything wrong with
Freenet, I just don't think it
will ever take off in the
mainstream.

The fact is that most of the
things that most people like to
use the WWW for--such as
e-commerce and Slashdot--cannot
be built on Freenet, since it
has no cookies and no memory.
Given this, I can't see anything
happening with Freenet except
that it becomes a huge
storehouse for illegal porn,
pirated MP3s and 3l33t w8r3z.

It's a shame, because the
potential political benefits
that it raises, by allowing
dissident speech in repressive
countries, is great.

I guess my question for the
Freenet developers would be: I
am not a pirate, a privacy nut,
a political dissident, or
someone trying to spread illegal
trade secrets. What does Freenet
offer me? And are these benefits
broad enough to a broad enough
segment of the world population
to create the momentum needed
for Freenet to work
sociologically as well as
technically?

-- Eric Scheirer
MIT Media Laboratory

Ian:

Brandon (one of the other core Freenet developers) did e-mail you twice
to answer the comments you made in Wired, he still awaits your response
on the matter.
Ok, what does Freenet offer someone who doesn't care about anonymity?
One point that many people miss is that it is actually a very
efficient way to distribute information due to its dynamic caching and
dynamic mirroring. Freenet will move information to where it is
in-demand, and will duplicate popular information automatically so that
you should never encounter "The SlashDot Effect" with Freenet. In other
words, your ability to publish information is no longer limited to the
Bandwidth you can pay for. Because of this it should actually be a
better way to distribute information than, say, the WWW or Usenet, even
ignoring the fact that the information can't be censored. TheCarp
mentions this below.

Wireless Freenet (Score:4,
Interesting) by john187

I think Freenet would dovetail nicely
with wireless network technology. I
system of Freenet servers 1-2 km
apart could blanket metropolitan
areas and eliminate dependency on
ISP's for network service.

What are your thoughts on this? Are
any hardware people interested in
looking at this problem? Building
some prototypes?

Ian:

I agree completely, we have actually kept the protocol packet-based for
just this sort of reason. I think Freenet would be perfect for a
distribute decentralized radio network, and it would be a very exciting
project.

Reversed priorities? (Score:5, Insightful) by
mattr

If files live longer the more they
are thrashed, will this not just
breed thrasher bots and crowd out
data from clients with less
connectivity? How about a voting
system for one or more directories
which does not add files easily but
they are there for good. If it is
that good a resource it deserves a
champion to protect it.

Also, I take it you are comfortable
with already having divulged the
identities of the entire first wave
of sysadmins of FreeNet nodes? Seems
like your most vulnerable time is
now.

I've long considered the value of a
peer to peer system for countries
underdeveloped in the areas of
infrastructure and rights.
Unfortunately it seems that social
engineering is steadily on the side
of repression. Wouldn't the best way
to get FreeNet into such environments
be to make it a source of economic
strength? In other words, your growth
metric might look much better if you
include authorship, copyright, and
microcashpayment management. I can't
see the Declaration of Independence
sticking in the current system for
long.. but it is in both a good
library and a good bookstore.

Basically you have built a
distribution system which in its
optimal configuration has no delivery
time since you already have the
commodity on your hard drive... make
it work for business as well and it
may reduce prices and take on a life
of its own.

Ian:

Well there is certainly more than one question here!

Firstly, the issue of "thrashing" or flooding Freenet is covered in the
FAQ - I refer you to section 4.2. To summarize, the dynamic caching
mechanism makes it very difficult to artificially make data more popular
(since Freenet will just cache it on a node right beside you, and all of
your requests will be soaked up by it).

As for divulging the addresses of the first few people to set-up Freenet
nodes (I assume you refer to our "Inform.php" mechanism) that is merely
a mechanism to "boot-strap" Freenet for testing purposes. Once Freenet
is up and running properly we will have no need for such a mechanism,
but it is useful in the early stages (and people have the option to
switch it off in the config file if they really care that much). I
should make it clear that Freenet now is still at an early stage of
development. The project is lucky to have some very talented and
hard-working developers, particularly Brandon Wiley and Oskar Sandberg
who have really helped turned this from a dream into a reality, but we
still have much work to do. Data modification, Content Hashed Keys,
local data encryption, the list of ideas which we want to implement
before a 1.0 release is long - but this is indicative of the
cutting-edge nature of the project.

In terms of making it possible to sell information using Freenet, or a
Freenet-like system, I suspect that might be missing the point we are
making! Never say never though...

No matter what zealots tell you, no
freedom is absolute. Your freedoms
end when they infringe on the rights
of others. This includes your freedom
of speech.

My thoughts when I first heard about
this project were extremely positive
for the first five seconds or so. I was
going to set up a server, and suggest
all my other bandwidth-rich friends
do the same. Then I thought about
what would be going to and from my
server.

Anonymity has its place from time to
time, but usually in the cases of an
abuse by a higher power against an
individual. But in the general case,
I feel that freedom of speech entails
the responsability of
accountability.

If I'm going to say that I hate
Virgos, and all Virgos should be
locked up and treated as the inhuman
beasts that they are, I should have
the conviction to do so without a
pointy hood over my head.

If I'm going to be distributing porn,
I should be able to do it with a
clean conscience. If I wanted to post
naked pictures on a Web site, I'd be
in some way traceable. And if I
wasn't identifiable, there at least
would be a mechanism in place (an
e-mail to my upstream provider) to
curb my freedom of speech if I was
posting vile material.

The ideal of individual freedom falls
apart in the environment of actual individuals
who abuse it.

I'm not saying in any way that this
should be a legal matter, or that the
product should be banned, just that
in the case that it turns out like I
expect it to (the majority of traffic
for illicit files, both violating
copyright and basic human decency) I
will have no respect, even a measure
of contempt for the people that do
run the servers. THEY will be the
ones I will hold accountable for the
'free speech' being exercised on the
network. And if they were to be sued
off the net by the RIAA, Church of
Scientology and MPAA, I can't say
I'll be surprised, or all that
upset.

What arguments can you make FOR free,
anonymous access to kiddie porn, snuff films
and rape/torture erotica? Why should *I*, a
server operator, nurture these sorts of
activities in an ideal environment?

Ian:

You cannot have free speech without tolerating speech that you
personally don't agree with. If you don't want to risk aiding the
distribution of "kiddie porn" (which is *already* freely
distributed on the Internet anyway), then steer clear of Freenet - it's
not for you. On the other hand, if you want to help build a system
which will help humanity share information, even though some of that
information will be distasteful to you personally, then set up a Freenet
node. See our
philosophy page for more information on this.

some technical questions.. (Score:4,
Interesting) by Cuthalion

Once something is put on freenet it cannot be
removed. What does this mean? No
censorship, but also misinformation
stays in the system just as long as
correct information, so long as it
can 'trick' people into requesting it
(by seeming to be relevant, for
instance). This can be exploited
intentionally to censor (some things
are nearly unfindable on search
engines because of 'key' collisions -
the band 'Reload', for instance), or
unintentionally - I write something,
post it, and five minutes later learn
that I was mistaken. Oh well! People
will just have to decide for
themselves what is truth. Even if I
DO post a retraction, there is no way
to verify that a trusted entity (such
as the original author) retracted it.

As a medium for sharing artistic
works (e.g., music, essays, images)
this is not as important, but to
carry actual facts, (e.g., hardware
specs, controvertial news items, etc.)
this seems a major shortcoming. Is
there any solution to this problem in
place or in progress? I ask because I
feel that this is not adequately
discussed in the FAQ.

Ian:

As I mention above we are working on improving the way that people can
"vote" for the validity of information - I hope that this will address
some of the concerns you raise. Having said that, you can't really
drownout information on Freenet in the manner you suggest. If you have
the key, you can get the data unless it has died out due to never being
requested.

The whole area of choosing appropriate
keys for the data you wish to insert is a huge, and ripe for
further research. For some things, like MP3s, or poems, choosing an
appropriate key is pretty easy ("music/mp3/artist/album/track" or
"poem/poet/title" for example). It merely requires a standard way to
refer to these things - and since it is in everybody's interest to use
the same standard, hopefully good standards will emerge quite quickly.
Other things are less easy. When people created the Internet, they
probably never thought it might be used the way we are using it now -
and they didn't need to. Similarly, Freenet is a platform upon which we
hope others will build.

Re: Why compete? (Score:4, Interesting)
by TheCarp

Actually....the Freenet Has a huge
technical advantage over http
protocols. The thing is... it's not
just hard to track down who wrote it
(unless they sign their name...it's
only anonymous if you want it to be)
and where it's stored...

It has cacheing built in. When you
request something, it propagates.
This means more copies exist. So if
a document is REALLY popular, then
no one server is bogged down with
distributing it.

Imagine some really popular band that
believes in mp3 distribution puts
out a new mp3. Now everyone 80% of
college students go to download it.

WHat happens? After the first few
downloads at each college...the
local university freenet server will
have a copy of the mp3 and will be
serving it to that university.

None of the requests for it will be
going outside the local university
network. Its the basic equivalent of
everyone in the world being behind
multiple layers of http cacheing
proxy, except somewhat better (its
built into the protocol)

Ian:

What can I say? Cool - you get it! Just to reiterate though, Freenet
is an experiment. It is quite different from projects like Linux and
Mozilla, which are essentially open source re-implementations of
technology which has already been proven (and, incidentally, I am a big
supporter of both of these projects). There aren't really any
precedents which we could follow in designing Freenet, certainly nothing
that came close to what we wanted to achieve. The difficulty with
Freenet is that we can only *really* test it by encouraging people to
use it on a reasonably wide scale. There is much further work to be
done on Freenet, it is really only at the beginning of its testing
phase right now - so please don't expect it to change the world just yet
- but please do try it out!

--------------------------

You may also be interested to note that we have released Freenet
0.1beta.

You forgot the world also contains Judges and people with guns who follow their orders.

FreeNet is about more than freedom of speech. It's about freedom of information transfer and storage too. The Public doesn't want and will not tolerate the existance of such freedom when (not if) it is used for purposes in conflict with their comfort. FreeNet will be shut down as soon as it has been found to be useful.

These people are wasting their time.

I think the only feasible systems have accountability and optional psuedo-anonymity built it, but the identifying information must be obtainable only with a court order and that restriction much be gauranteed by technological methods and law which will send violators of that restriction to jail.

I work in Marketing, and I am well aware of the abuses perpertrated by spammers and junk

...... just a small remark... what are you as a marketing person doing reading 'news for nerds' ?

However, I am also a keen amatuer scholar of the US Constitution, and I wonder about the implications of this technology. If misapplied, it could end up with non-US citizens being able to say whatever they liked, with no fear of retribution. This could include opinions that no democrat could countenance. (I am thinking here primarily of Communism and Atheism, but this 'anonymous posting' technology could be used to promote almost any anti-us agenda).

Not entirely sure if you are just trolling or if this is serious... but lets take it serious... The word democrat was invented in Greece and not in your USA. The first constitution in Europe predates the USA one by a few hundred years, and besides... having lived in both the USA and Europe I can only come to the conclusion that where you have freedom of speech in your constitution, most of western europe has it in practise not just on paper. Also. freedom of speech comes with the nice freedom to refrain from reading what you don't like And... last but not least, this world is 'a bit' bigger then your USA. If you would actually understand anything about that country you live in, and its constitution and history, you would understand that the USA has tried to convince others to get the same political system as them, or at most a slight variation on it. This is all nice since that system happens to work reasonably well, but it doesn't make you any different from those communists and atheists that you seem so afraid off. Maybe you are just afraid of yourself, of your beliefs being so weakly founded that things which should be easily recognisable as propaganda might convince you? well.. in that case just don't read... but don't determine for other people if they are strong enough.

The problem with this technology is that while Americans are used to freedom of speech, and for the most part use it responsibly (see this very forum for examples) the less developed parts of the world (and I am thinking mainly of Europe here) do not have the tradition of free speech that we Americans do, and so may abuse the privelege this technology has bestowed upon them.

I could comment on this, but actually its so obviously wrong that I don't think I have to explain this.

This is absolutely true. True control of information has been impossible since the development of reasonably easy to use cryptography. It doesn't really matter if the information is traceable if it is practically unreadable. The CDA was more or less a joke for that reason. If people want to exchange information which others don't want them to exchange, it's pretty trivial to take the traffic underground. No legislator is going to change that practical reality without seriously draconian efforts.

(This browser doesn't support cookies, so this may appear to be an anonymous posting. I [logi.org] am not trying to hide.)

Speaking of standard protocols and getting mainstream apps to support free-net (which I'm still thinking about whether I support in general or not), is anyone working on defining URI's for documents on free-net and maybe even adding support for these to Mozilla?

If this really is a more efficient distribution medium people might consider simultaneously releasing a document on the web and on free-net in HTML and link from each to the other.

In fact, you could deliberately copy entire sub-webs from the HTTP-based web to a free-net based equivalent. It would be easy to script this and convert all links. You now have an instant user-base, the system is made much more legitimate and the added number of users and servers makes it more robust, both technically and against themakers, users and abusers of the law.

It seems that no one is concerned about the very probable fact that illegal pornography will end up on your computer! Does no one have any problems with that? What happens, if for some reason, your computer is confiscated, and they find child porn. Try to explain that.

As for inserting bogus information, the worth of information in Freenet is determined by the number of people who request it. Random data will only displace other data in Freenet if people actually request it

Doesn't that mean that a DOS attack that included both bogus insertion and bogus requests (possibly using something like the distributed DOS attacks seen recently) could make it impossible to find the attacked information?

I have to concede the fact that action != speech. However, I remind you that Ian said:

You cannot have free speech without tolerating speech that you personally don't agree with. If you don't want to risk aiding the distribution of "kiddie porn" (which is *already* freely distributed on the Internet anyway), then steer clear of Freenet - it's not for you.

Semantics and logical hair-splitting aside, Freenet can allow and even facilitate the distribution of illegal material in a manner that makes it exceedingly difficult to defend against, under the auspices of "free speech". Noble words and intentions, to be sure, and a worthwhile endeavor. I think it's incomplete, and dangerously so.

Python is right -- action and speech are separate entities that cannot be equated. Ian seemed to equate them, so I commented on his answer. Assuming (as I do), that Ian doesn't really equate kiddie porn to free speech, he at least seems to be saying that on Freenet, you can only support free speech by simultaneously allowing a method by which the distribution of kiddie porn is *greatly* facilitated. I say "greatly" because there is the opportunity for a Freenet adminitrator's node to be used in a way the administrator may not like, and cannot defend against.

I'm not trying to make an ass of Ian: to the contrary, I wish the project much success. However, their decision to not allow node-administrator control -- indeed, no control whatsoever -- places their project in a dangerous position by which it can and will be used for such things as kiddie porn, and the good intentions of the project gets swept aside.

It's not a misparaphrase, it's an exact quote, copy-and-pasted from Ian's answer.

Ian does not seem to be implying the opposite: he seems to be equating free speech (specifically, speech that you personally do not agree with) with distribution of "kiddie porn". I went to the extreme, granted, by taking into the "action" part of creating kiddie porn, but it is a valid extension of the argument. Hair-splitting aside, kiddie porn (at any stage, whether creating, distributing, or possesion) is illegal now. Whether you're streaming bits, or actually sodomizing a 10 year old boy, if it's kiddie porn, it's illegal.

First, Freenet is not a place where rape and mutilation take place, but instead a place where they may be documented. Second, he made no claim that kiddie porn was free speech, but only that it would be necessary to tolerate it in order to support free speech.

Okay, in order: I'm not saying Freenet should be illegal (as you seem to be saying -- if I've miscontrued your argument, I apologize and retract my following statement). I'm saying that it is a weakness of Freenet to not allow some level of control so that such activity does not take place. At any point in the process of "kiddie porn" -- creation, distribution, possesion -- the product and/or action is illegal. Hmm... I guess I AM saying it's illegal... your point.

I disagree that allowing free speech means tolerating legally and morally (oooh.. the "M" word) repugnant activities. It is the grossest of mistakes (or some kind of utopian happytalk) to say you cannot have one without the other. The world is not like a computer: there are many shades of gray in addition to the black and white binary world.

not every form of expression falls into free speech . . . Ass-fucking a 10 year old boy is not "expression".

. . . and noone at Freenet would tell you otherwise. In fact, its quite impossible to ass fuck a 10 year old boy on Freenet. You see, the real problem takes place in our heads and in our communities. The representation is mostly a symptom and it's something we should learn from. It's quite possible that this anticipated documentation of taboo subjects will encourage us to understand why people act this way (and not simply be disgusted by it).

Tough one -- I don't say that you will be sodomizing 10 year olds on Freenet. I say that Freenet provides no provision to defend against questionable material, and as such facilitates the distribution. Returning to your above statement, you can't have one without the other, whereas I say "Yes you can". Eliminating the control of one's own node may not attract the legions of free-thinking people the project hopes for. Rather, it may attract only the bottom-feeders of society, since it gives them untraceable conduits to pass their material around. I think the balance struck is the wrong balance -- some control needs to be there.

Ian talks about routing around "cancerous" nodes when Evil Corporate Geniuses will pollute the Pure Freenet Stream with corporate doubletalk. Yet, he simply says, "don't run Freenet if you don't want the possibility of hosting kiddie porn on your node". This seems to be a wildly dis-proportionate view. Corpoations may be dumb and witless, but evil? Not really.

Finally, I may or may not "stay away from Freenet." I like the idea, I like the ideology. I'm not thrilled about the seeming decision to give up on blatently illegal activities. It's a tough choice, and I don't envy the Freenet's team job ahead of them in defending what (in a more perfect world) would be an indispensible entity. Good luck and best wishes to them.

While I like the Freenet's technical capabilities (dynamic caching and mirroring), I dislike their philosophical stance on "free speech", to wit:

The simple answer is that copyright is economic censorship (ie. restricting the free distribution of information for economic reasons), and thus Freenet will make it difficult or impossible to enforce copyright.

This is ridiculous. Copyrights are not economic censorship, unless the copyright holder chooses to use it as such. For example, Philip Greenspun [photo.net] lets web admins use his photos, generally for free, as long as they attribute him. He maintains the copyright. This is economic censorship? No, it's a legally enforceable method of control of somebody's intellectual property. (I know, IP is a dirty word...) Philip might spend hours setting up and taking a shot -- if he wants to retain control of his interpretation of an idea, that's his legal right.

You cannot have free speech without tolerating speech that you personally don't agree with. If you don't want to risk aiding the distribution of "kiddie porn" (which is *already* freely distributed on the Internet anyway), then steer clear of Freenet - it's not for you.

So, in other words, "kiddie porn" is free speech. Really? I didn't know that. Guess ritual rape and mutilation is free speech too, and if done in a pointy hat with candles, it's a religious observance, too.

While I agree with the point that supporting free speech means supporting ideas and thoughts that you may not agree with, not every form of expression falls into free speech. Throwing a punch at someone, even if it's a cracker-ass Grand Wizard of the KKK, is not "expression". It's assault, and your butt will rightly be hauled into jail. Ass-fucking a 10 year old boy is not "expression". It's ass-fucking a 10 year old boy -- a minor, and protected (rightly) by law.

Developing a system whereby administrators (you can't even rightly call them that, since they "administer" nothing) have no control over content, you make a technically competent and interesting system that is *really* uninviting to operate, since your box can be the source of something nefarious (or something you disagree with, and do not wish to support). You are welcome to your ideas, but do *NOT* push them onto me.

A side issue is about the "voting" or "rating" system built into Freenet. I like the idea, but I think it overlooks something. What about tiny, insignificant, but really important things that don't get used much. For example, a HOW-TO on setting up an Amiga 2000 to run NetBSD. Not many A2000s out there, nobody runs NetBSD anyway... what's this node about Windows 2001? Looks neeto...

If unpopular nodes get pushed out, doesn't that run contrary to the "free speech" dictum? Unpopular now means "kill the niggers", but 40 years ago, unpopular meant "I have a dream...". Popularity is a poor substitute for personal decision.

Freenet is a great concept, but it's missing a few important concepts and components. I personally think that an philosophical ideal and a technical solution don't neccessarily mix very well. GNU software might be the rule-proving exception or the theory-smashing evidence. Freenet, however, is mostly concerned with ideology, and is developing a technical solution to promote that ideology at the expense of that self-same ideology.

You cannot have free speech without tolerating speech that you personally don't agree with. If you don't want to risk aiding the distribution of "kiddie porn" (which is *already* freely distributed on the Internet anyway), then steer clear of Freenet - it's not for you.

So, in other words, "kiddie porn" is free speech.

This is a very wretched misparaphrase. Ian seems to be implying the exact opposite. His point is not that kiddie porn ought to be protected from censorship, but that Freenet will do so, due to its technical nature.

so if someone cracks the NT sam file for a bank using l0phtcrack, the fbi is going to go after l0pht, since they wrote the software? i dont think he should be accountable for anything... why not go after the internet's founders, heck they pioneered the internet which is used for distribution of 'kiddie porn' right?;)

I am astounded at the arrogance and ignorance displayed by DumbMarketingGuy in his post! Some main points:

- Europeans are used to a certain degree of freedom of speech. The UK has strong libel laws, but if you can't be proven a liar then you can say pretty much what you like. The press has a lot of freedom, public rally's (rallies?) are legal, etc.

- How exactly can you abuse freedom of speech? Making statements of hate? Personal abuse? Please, provide an example, and make damn sure I can't show you American examples of it (hey, I'm not ragging on Americans, I am merely asking him to prove free speech can be abused, and that Americans are not involved in that particular abuse)

- less developed in Europe? I'm flabbergasted.

- this 'anonymous posting' technology could be used to promote almost any anti-us agenda So it could. It could be used to promote any agenda. What's your point? Why should a technology be pro-American. Why shouldn't a technology be available that is 'Anti-oppressive regime' - think how such a tool would benefit people in totalitarian states. (No, I'm not saying America is an oppressive regime. Don't make that insinuation.)

In short, your sheltered naive view of the world bemuses me.

~Cederic (using the freedom of speech he seems to have forgotten to abuse, even though he's had it all along and yet - amazingly - isn't American)

You cannot have free speech without tolerating speech that you personally don't agree with. If you don't want to risk aiding the distribution of "kiddie porn" (which is *already* freely distributed on the Internet anyway), then steer clear of Freenet - it's not for you.

So, in other words, "kiddie porn" is free speech. Really? I didn't know that. Guess ritual rape and mutilation is free speech too, and if done in a pointy hat with candles, it's a religious observance, too.

First, Freenet is not a place where rape and mutilation take place, but instead a place where they may be documented. Second, he made no claim that kiddie porn was free speech, but only that it would be necessary to tolerate it in order to support free speech. It's the same principle as "innocent until proven guilty." Even though someone is probably guilty (and Freenet will probably have horible information), we give them the benefit of the doubt because we think everyone has the right to a trial (and Freenet will be invaluable for certain people). We directly advance the notion of free speech without injuring someone else. This is a good trade off in my opinion.

not every form of expression falls into free speech . . . Ass-fucking a 10 year old boy is not "expression".

. . . and noone at Freenet would tell you otherwise. In fact, its quite impossible to ass fuck a 10 year old boy on Freenet. You see, the real problem takes place in our heads and in our communities. The representation is mostly a symptom and it's something we should learn from. It's quite possible that this anticipated documentation of taboo subjects will encourage us to understand why people act this way (and not simply be disgusted by it).

Developing a system whereby administrators (you can't even rightly call them that, since they "administer" nothing) have no control over content, you make a technically competent and interesting system that is *really* uninviting to operate, since your box can be the source of something nefarious (or something you disagree with, and do not wish to support). You are welcome to your ideas, but do *NOT* push them onto me.

You should really read the part where he suggests that people like you should stay away from Freenet.

How about a voting system for one or more directories which does not add files easily but they are there for good. If it is that good a resource it deserves a champion to protect it.

and the web page says that infrequently-requested data will eventually expire and be deleted.

I think that the "champion" idea for keeping data is a good idea. Suppose the freenet server allowed the admin to define a separate, node admin-controlled area. In that area would reside data that the admin wants to be permanently available. Under normal operation, the data would be distributed across all of FreeNet, but if it all expired and someone then asked for it again, the request would make its way back to the permanent repository and get the data from there. This does negate some of the advantages of FreeNet, namely that the admin will know what's on his server and could be contstrued to be liable for it, but it allows a guarantee of permanence for the data. Does this sound reasonable?

--Phil (I'll probably be setting up my FreeNet node when I get my cable modem.)

Balderdash. People will be able to use Freenet just like peoples in oppressed countries all over the world are able to use less advanced technologies, like remailers and proxy servers for surfing anonymously NOW. I suggest you do some reading up on how hard it is to detect some of these technologies, let alone block them. The whole point of things like Freenet and remailers it to deal with countries like China and others that control their citizens access to the net.

And the fact that its hard as it is for peoples in those countries to speak freely now is all the more reason for things like Freenet - and all the more reason why we have to make it better and more foolproof so that no can censor content thru it. -- Python

While I agree with the point that supporting free speech means supporting ideas and thoughts that you may not agree with, not every form of expression falls into free speech. Throwing a punch at someone, even if it's a cracker-ass Grand Wizard of the KKK, is not "expression". It's assault, and your butt will rightly be hauled into jail. Ass-fucking a 10 year old boy is not "expression". It's ass-fucking a 10 year old boy -- a minor, and protected (rightly) by law.

The fallacy here is that speech does not equal action and vice versa. You are confusion the action with the speech, and thats apples and oranges. So your whole point is fallacious and your argument falls apart there. It IS OK to talk about punching someone in the face, its not OK to do it most cases. Its OK to talk about, even describe kiddie porn, its not OK to have sex with children.

Kiddie Porn is illegal not because of the speech, but because of the ACTIONS. Its deemed to be so abhorent that videos and pictures of it are illegal as well to, ostensibly, reduce the amount of real pedophila occuring. Its the ACTION thats at stake here, not the speech. Its OK to talk about it, even describe it but to do it, is not legal.

So you're commiting a real logic fallacy equating the two, and your not looking at whether the cure is worse than the disease. -- Python

This is kind-of a computerised version of the liable issue. When people download stuff from the Internet and install it as root, they are taking a big risk. It is just the same with Freenet, except perhaps the threat is more obvious since you know that the person who created the file is untracable. This issue is, however, easily addressed using digital signatures. You could build up a trusted reputation by signing all of your output with the same signature, while remaining anonymous.

In addition to this, we are working on ways to give Freenet a more accurate impression of the quality of data stored in it (as determined purely by popularity).

Ok, so the FBI has to go to court and explain that it was actually their investigations which placed the data on the node whose owner they are now trying to prosecute! Also recall that in-order to do this, the FBI has actually helped propogate the offending data further throughout Freenet.

Overall, Freenet is a Good Thing. I'm saddened to see the outright hypocrisy shown by many Slashdotters, who claim to value free speech yet attack Freenet simply because it will enable just that.

But the idea does need a bit more work. A few things that would make it even more valuable.

Signatures. I know this one's being worked on; perhaps the Freenet folks should look into GPG integration for this one. The idea is that you still get the true anonymity which Freenet makes possible, but you can also get the reverse: absolute verification. The reason I think this should be integrated into Freenet is because then it could be possible to see, say, if an article was signed before actually downloading it (think of it as a "Verified" flag). The other advantage is the future possibility of being able to update data that you've injected.

The only way this is going to work well, however, is if they get real integration with encryption. Enough that you can basically sign something with one click (and whatever passwords are needed, of course). That's one of the main reasons encryption isn't as ubiquitous as it should be; it's unnecessarily difficult to use. I'm hoping this will start to change once the RSA patent expires, so that more people can start building encryption functions into their software (OpenPGP standard, anyone?)

Searches. This one's certainly going to be harder to do, seeing as you'd be searching on a distributed system. However, you can't rely on guessable keys, which the current system uses. That simply won't work forever, particularly since the keys need to be unique.

More/better documentation. The reason for this is so that OS-native clients can be developed. Java is a good place to start, and it does allow for platforms with no OS-native client to run Freenet servers/clients, but the memory and performance gains from an OS-native client cannot be denied. It also allows clients and servers to be made which better fit the OS on which they're run in terms of interface. What I would suggest is that the Java client become the "reference release" of Freenet. Since it's Open-Source, other clients can then be brought up to date with the Java client without too much trouble. The choice then becomes down to using the Java client to stay bleeding-edge, or OS-native for the performance gains.

Some way to manage firewall support. I would be operating a Freenet node right now, but the security of my machine is important to me, so I have a personal firewall set up. My guess is that this will come in time, just as signatures will.

The idea of Freenet is a great one. As it is, it needs a bit of work, but that's to be expected of a first release. As it is even now, though, it shows a great deal of promise.

Oh, a quick bit about the "concerns" some Slashdotters seem to have about this.

First, that terrorists might use it. That's just plain crap. Why would a terrorist want to use Freenet? You can't use it to plan attacks, due to its public nature (sure, they might not know who you are, but if they know to expect an attack then you're still not going to be able to do it). And claiming responsibility for an attack anonymously sort of defeats the purpose of claiming responsibility. So you can't plan attacks, and you can't boast about them.

Warez/MP3. Not in Freenet's current state. As it gets easier to use, maybe. Regardless, it won't be different from any other platform. The Web gets used for warez too. So do FTP, Hotline, IRC, ICQ, AOL, and any number of network services. And even before these were around, there was still a warez trade. One more forum isn't going to make that much of a difference.

Kiddie porn, rape/torture/snuff films, and the like. Again, it'll happen. And it's a shame, too; I wouldn't mind seeing it all mysteriously vanish in one big system crash. But free speech is working at its best when it protects the speech we hate. You cannot silence any voice -any voice- without jeopardizing every voice. It's a sad fact that as long as there are sickos who want this sort of thing, there'll be even sicker freaks who actually make it. These people are already very good at keeping their stuff from being traceable; Freenet's anonymity won't be doing them any favors. In fact, it could hinder them; as anonymity emboldens these monsters, they'll get sloppier, counting on Freenet's anonymity to save them. A very costly mistake indeed, for while the films may be free speech, the techniques used in making them (a snuff film, for example, by definition requires that someone be murdered to make the film) are not protected. A third factor needs to be considered here: the "re-inventing the wheel" phenomenon. Kiddie porn is comparatively easy to get, but rape/snuff films are, understandably, exceedingly difficult to find. Usually they have to be custom-made for one person, since they're obviously hard to sell (think about it: would you sell tapes of yourself committing various felonies?) There is always the chance that, because some sicko got his fix from something off the Freenet, he won't commission a film and one less person will suffer. Is that not worth it?

Will Freenet be misused? Certainly; anything that can be misused inevitably is. Does that mean it shouldn't be allowed to exist? Certainly not. Even in the most hideous abuses of this, there is potential for some good to come of it. And the potential for good from proper uses of this is staggering.

One final note, and an interesting possibility: might it eventually be possible, via a browser plugin (to give one example) to integrate a Freenet client into a Web browser? Putting a Web interface on top of Freenet would certainly make it much easier to use, and could speed its adoption greatly. Who knows; there may be a time when a "Freeweb" comes into being, where entire sites (rather than files) are sent through the network. Some of the underlying principles of Freenet (particularly the moving of data to where it is most needed) would benefit the Web greatly. Any thoughts on something like that?

Finally, true freedom of speech. What I find interesting is all the people that "supposedly" like freedom of speech until they begin thinking that anything can be said and then they become very Politically Correct about what should be free and what shouldn't be. Interestingly, this is mirroring American Politics and the attempts of Federal, State, and City goverments trying to limit this type of speech or that type of speech. Everyone is becoming a victim of someone else's freedom of speech.

What's funny is here is America Free Speech is a RIGHT!!! Whether that speech is hateful towards a group or is critical of the/a goverment at least our forefathers knew that and they accepted it because they felt that all speech has to be free in order for a society is to consider itself free. People have arguements whether that is correct or not but the reality is that free speech has been under attack for over a century in one form or another.

FreeNet is to give complete freedom over what you say. Whether you own it or are anonymous with it you still have the complete freedom to say it without retribution. That is what Freedom of Speech is all about. And is also one of the primary reasons that not even the Supreme Court wants to limit that kind of freedom on the internet. Anyone can say anything and no one institution has control over it. But does it stop the goverment from trying to limit it, even with two dead CDA bills, no, they now are trying to force issues with the ISP. The FBI is trying to get more generalized, rather then specific, rights to commandiere any computer with information that they suspect might be on a computer because of, oh my, terrorists or child pornographers.

When did American's want the goverment to keep a close eye on them? For over two hundred years people have flocked to America because thought control, and other basic freedoms, were considered of paramount importance. Now when technology begins to aid in securing those rights to freedom people begin to worry about the "criminals" and this is wrong because I don't like this speech it hurts me - because I'm a victim.

Is that the biggest conspiracy the goverment has created. Without creating it. Proproganda is still proproganda and anyone who believes that a goverment cares about freedom of speech but within reason, is a person blind to censorship.

Of course the really superb thing about FreeNet is that it is completly non-American and is truly about complete freedom!!

This guy is clueless. Typical liberal leanings, willing to tolerate warez, rape/kiddie/snuff/torture porn and God knows what else just so satisfy his need for "free information". Bah.

What will probably happen, and would seem to be the best idea, is if MegaCorp A wants to keep it's brand new copy of OfficeSuite 3000 from showing up everywhere, just coordinate a upload/request barrage of something that looks like the OS3000 but is a worm/virus/trojan whatnot, then blame it on "pirates" or "hackers", pointing out that you can only "trust a copy we put out."

This reply neatly avoided one question I have - how do you ensure integrity of the files this thing distributes? It's all fine and dandy that you *can* put files out there, but if somebody poisons the thing, there's no way to distinguish slashdot-0.9.tar.gz 490381 bytes from slashdot-0.9.tar.gz 490381 bytes (which happens to have a root compromise in install.sh).

There are just a *ton* of tech issues to resolve to get this thing off the ground.. only some of them have been addressed. The harder ones are on the human interfacing... you're putting data on a network with no way to ensure integrity. Then again, in an anonymous net what would be the point? Hrrrmmm...

Ever since I first heard of FreeNet, I've been trying to come up with some 'clean room' attacks (i.e. I don't read the FreeNet discussions)

Here's one I call 'The Info Blockade' that is along the lines you describe, but uses specific Freenet features to defeat FreeNet:

1) Imagine a file that a government wishes to block within its borders (a manifesto, plans for a strike, documents proving massive corruption, etc. Historical example: Daniel Ellsberg's The Pentagon Papers from the 70's)

2) The government creates a false file (it might even be able to forge authentication, if it's the right government, and determined enough)

3) The government massively releases the false file via it's own FreeNet servers (while possibly also pursuing the usual stamp-out tactics). This information would a) likely be the closest server to a domestic requester of the information b) would slowly 'diffuse' onto the larger FreeNet

4) Within hours, the Government makes large numbers of requests for the false file at the communication bottlenecks into the country. This will fill the caches of the foreign (uncontrolled) Freenet sites with the false file (both from copies that 'diffused out of national boundaries in step 3, or copies from Government sites that happened to be the 'nearest' freeNet node with a copy of the file.

5) Eventually, this false data would be largely 'fixed' into a blockade around the communications bottle necks (the virtual border) of the nation. The World at large may see the genuine document, but the high-bandwidth tactics of the gov't would mean that, internally, the nearest available FreeNet copy would be 'false'.

6) The manigfesto's author could e discredited by the forged file, the strike could fail, organizers could even be made to give themselves away through false 'planted' info.

This is not a criticism of FreeNet. it is simply fodder for the 'debugging' of FreeNet I am far more interested in the free speech aspects than the warez/prOn use, and I hope FreeNet will someday stand against a determined opponent with great resources, likie a gov't or multinational

How do you learn that the author of a manifesto isn't the nutcase your downloaded file makes him seem?

Or that the new scientific theory/application (which the gov't intends to seize and classify, since as a citizen, you and your works are its property - strained, yes, but that's how it works) isn't flawed [Science see a lot more 'incorrect' breakthroughs than correct ones, every year]

someone cracks the NT sam file for a bank using l0phtcrack, the fbi is going to go after l0pht, since they wrote the software

I think the FBI would have cause to go after l0pht if they said things like "Our software can be used to crack NT security for banks, so if cracking the security for banks makes you nervous, then you probably shouldn't have anything to do with our project."

Selling a notched strip of spring steel is not illegal. Selling it as a tool to open your car when you lose your keys is not illegal. Selling it as a tool to break into someone else's car is illegal. It's a fine line between saying "This tool I'm selling can be used for illegal things" and saying "Buy this tool I'm selling so you can do illegal things." I think an ambitious federal prosecutor could severely blur the difference between the two.

I'm not saying that this is right; I'm merely saying that I think that Ian has walked into the kill zone of an ambush with a bullseye painted on his torso.

Call this flamebait, if you like, but I cannot BELIEVE the naivete of this guy. He has acknowledged, in the worst possible way, that this system can be used for Bad Things. Read this quote:

If you don't want to risk aiding the distribution of "kiddie porn" (which is *already* freely distributed on the Internet anyway), then steer clear of Freenet - it's not for you.

After this thing gets up and running, the FBI will doubtless be all over it. While they may not be able to identify the people who post child pornography, or the people who run the servers, they will certainly be able to identify the guy who helped architect the system. They will find quotes of his like the one above. They will charge him, try him, and convict him, and fry him.

Er... charge him with what? Creating an information storage-retrieval system?

Er...yes. If I create an information retrieval system for the express purpose of disseminating child pornography, and then the system is used for disseminating child pornography, I think the Powers that Be might get a bit upset. You might think that silly, but I guarantee you that, given the sort of statement I quoted, law enforcement officials will NOT be amused. It will be apparent (to them) that this system was created for the express purpose of distributing illegal materials.

This is the fallacy of your thinking: People should *NOT* believe everything they read, should not take it at face value. If you publish something libelous, claiming it to be truth, and you are lying, then it is up to others to prove that you are wrong. Should you be punished? Your only punishment should be one of respect. If you lie enough, nobody will believe you.

I have enough integrity in society that if a faceless, nameless person is going to slander me, what do I care?

Except by my reading of the interview this won't nessecarily be true. Because the random noise would get voted out. Not true for current version, but the plan is that voting will occur post viewing of material. So if I get a chunk that's garbage, I vote it down. So do others. Eventually it is voted out of existence. Companies could concievably overwhelm the system if they could get all of their workers to believe the same idea. So for example let's just take company XYZ (no not the zipper company). Bob posts a nasty note about XYZ and people read it. It gets moderated up to a +3 (or however this works). Then XYZ finds it and wants to squash it. Now XYZ is a world-wide company. They insert a counter random noise note. These random notes won't show up cuz nobody moderated them up. They send all of their employees (or maybe just a few trusted at each site) a memo to moderate up this bogus note they just posted. Eventually the employees at XYZ won't see Bob's note anymore. However if they go home, and their ISP is running a Freenet server they will see the note, and know that their work tried to crushed the note and succeded in preventing its viewing from work. The real problem I would forsee is with AOL/Time-Warner. If they were company XYZ there would be an immense decrease in Bob's note being seen. This is merely my interpretation of the interview and FAQ. Not entirely sure if its true.

The simple answer is that copyright is economic censorship (ie. restricting the free distribution of information for economic reasons)

That has got to be one of the most self serving, amoral rationalizations I've heard in weeks!

censor - to examine in order to suppress or delete anything considered objectionable1 [m-w.com]

For copyright to be economic censorship it would have to be the author or content creator performing the censorship, denying other access to the author's own work.

There seems to be an underlying assumption that all people should have the rights to any work. This is right in line with a 5 year old's code of ethics. Everything that exists is mine.

Authors create works for a many reasons, they may use copyright to ensure that their work is distributed as they intended. freenet itself contains a 6 page long copyright notice specifying what can and can not be done with freenet. Are we to believe that it does not apply and was accidentally included as one of the six files in the installation kit? Perhaps we are free to ignore it?

I can think of dozens of legitimate uses for freenet but it's creators should also honestly address its liabilities. If their goal is to create an tool for illegally distributing copyrighted material then acknowledge that and move on, if not then work to address it.

simple...the files need to be signed and you need to know the signing key. redhat and other distros have already addressed this and include a signature as part of the files (rpm for example signs everything).

IMHO, this guy needs to get his head out of the clouds and consider the consequences of this tool with crimes other than libel and kiddie porn.

I agree 100% that bad *political* speech should not be censored. Let the damn KKK march in a Jewish neighborhood, let Phelps continue to protest outside of funerals. The cost of permitting them to deliberately offend people is far less than the ultimate cost of allowing the government to "protect" us from offensive political speech and acts.

But not all speech is protected. Most of us would have serious moral qualms about helping in a kidnapping/murder, or in passing notes between a hitman and his client. Yet that's part of the payload that Freenet will carry, by allowing anonymous communications between hitman and client, or kidnapper and victim's family.

It's possible that the moral good in providing a safe haven for whistleblowers and oppressed peoples will outweight the blood from murder victims. This is the type of moral dilemma that keeps people up at night. Pretending that this type of crime won't occur doesn't help answer this question, and in fact it casts doubt on all anonymous schemes because it makes the proponents come across as shallow eggheads who don't fully comprehend the consequences of their actions.

(Why do I feel the urge to quote Oppenheimer quoting Shiva after the first nuclear detonation?)

Even if not, every ISP acceptable use policy I have seen, has some clause in it to that effect.

Mainly for Public Image(tm) and legal liability, both issues which would be moot under the Freenet system, mainly because:

I understand Freenet data is encrypted, supposedly to free the sysop from "knowingly" making transmissions.

No quotation marks or playing dumb will be required. If you'd have read the FAQ, you would have read that:

One of the design goals was to make it impossible to locate the exact place where any piece of information is stored. Even a server operator cannot determine what is stored at his own node.

That's right, there's no way to know what you're serving to the world. And that's why you can't (or shouldn't, IANAL) be held liable. Even if the cops bust in and seize your server, they have nothing on you, because they have no way of knowing what's on it.

It takes little more than one person to flood out a Usenet channel. The force necessary to take a document off Freenet would be more like if they had attempted to flood the whole Usenet out of existance to stop that one group, and even so Freenet is better (data on Usenet is sent everywhere, Data on Freenet is sorted to only a small nodes unless their is wide, distributed, demand for it).

- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

Second, consider your threat model. A lot of people are saying "well, that's not worse than the 'net in general". I don't think that's going to be good enough. There are two cruicial differences. The first one is scale. If Freenet becomes huge, a lot of its DOS problems will become easier. On the other hand, if it remains (relatively) small, DOSing it will not be hard. The second difference (as I pointed out in another post) is that Freenet is designed to make some people, corporations and government very unhappy. In a sense, one measure of success will be something like AOL trying to shut Freenet down.

If your attacker has a total capacity greater than the entire network and is persistant in his attack, then any network can be taken down. It is true that much of our resistance rests on the hope that we can reach a critical size, but this is true for more then just floods (a Freenet of only a 3 Nodes won't do much anonymity either). And (which is suppose is your point) with that kind of force one could take down any public network.

In this sense, I think that Eric Scheirers question about ordinary people would use Freenet for has more merit then Ian does. I do believe we will need a killer app (though, in some sense it is beginning to look like the freedom of speech on web will soon be so impeeded that it will be enough to drive everybody to Freenet - I certainly hope not however). But I also believe that seperating Cyberspace from meatspace by another layer is the natural next step of the information age - so I think the killer app will come.

The other option is a network that attempts to hide, using limited points of entry, uses cryptographic authenication for all node-node communication, and PGP type web-of-trust systems for allowing new nodes onto the network. This has been discussed as well, and Freenet's heart, the routing, could still be used on such a network, so even if this is what it has to come to, our current work would not be without value. I guess this is what you believe a network which allows the Freedom of speech has to look like - so I would be most interested in seeing the code you have written on it.

It ain't that easy. Making unique tags for each chunk of info is simple. But consider a different problem: how do I find the information I need? Crypto hashes of contents do not help at all. Again, to repeat another post, if I want to find out how many bowling balls can Clinton suck through a garden hose, and all keys like/us/politics/ClintonSucks,../ClintonSucksBowlingBalls, etc. are press releases from White House, how do I get my information?

How do you find information on the Web? You certainly didn't come to Slashdot looking for slashes and dots. You could have used a search engine, but a search engine is no more reliable then a descriptive Freenet key. Most probably, somebody told you about Slashdot, or you got saw a hypertext link from somewhere - both of which are equally possible on Freenet.

Oh, it'll work -- for some time. The real question is robustness. Consider that you are likely to find yourself on the front lines of active information warfare. In this case the relevant question is not "does it work?", but rather "how quickly/easily can it be killed?".

To me the same questions are one and the same (something like boolean question1(){return question2() == never}).

- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

Justice Steven's opinion for the Court note that arguments favoring the ratification of the Constitution advanced in the Federalist Papers were published under fictitious names. Justice Stevens said "quite apart from any threat of persecution, an advocate may believe her ideas will be more persuasive if her readers are unaware of her identity. Anonymity thereby provides a way for a writer who may be personally unpopular to ensure that readers will not prejudge her message simply because they do not like its proponent." Stevens concluded "Under our Constitution, anonymous pamphleteering is not a pernicious, fraudulent practice, but an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent. Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority. "

" The Court relied in part on a 1960 opinion, Talley v. California, which held that the First Amendment protected anonymous speech."

I wrote a more detailed reply, but Netscape crashed before posting...so I'll keep this short.

You are confusing two completely different entities... Censorship usually has to do with speech, ideas, points of view, etc. What we're referring to above is sensitive information, which are more like facts, specifications, and trade secrets.

The post to which I replied - and I even quoted this, and you quoted my quote - said "Censorship is sometimes a good thing." It said nothing about "protecting sensitive information" being a good thing.

So, based on your definition of "censorship," protecting our military secrets in the interest of keeping American citizens alive is "an evil act, pure and simple."

It's highly questionable as to how much of what's kept secret protects anyone. Anyway, not telling me something isn't censorship (except in a very loose metaphorical sense), it's keeping a secret. (Although the results can be just as bad. Check out this year's results from Project Censored [projectcensored.org].)

I addressed this in the post you replied to: "Got military secrets? Fine, make sure you only tell people you trust. Don't dare try to silence me if I find out about them." Using force to silence me if I find out something you don't want me to know is censorship, and it is evil. Using force to restrict people's freedom so they don't find out certain information is censorship, and it is evil.

And if you don't believe that there are other nations that would GLADLY smash us into little tiny bits merely for being demi-free Americans, you are very sadly mistaken.

If we had a less paranoid attitude we might treat those other nations better, rather than propping up right-wing dictators, or making excuses to go to war in oil- or mineral-rich nations; and those other nations might be more kindly disposed towards us.

Never! Using force to silence someone - anyone - is an evil act, pure and simple.

Read any history book on WWII and find out how control of important information saved hundreds and thousands of lives.

Without censorship, how could Hitler have come to power? How could have other nations failed to act during the early years of the Holocaust? Things would have been quote different had German Jews, or the victims of the rape of Nanking, been able to communicate freely with the citizens of the nations attacking them, and with rest of the world.

WWII might not have happened at all without censorship.

"National security" is no excuse for censorship. The "security" involved is almost always the job security of some politician. If the nation is so insecure that my speech can destroy it, then it needs to fall and be replaced by something better.

Got military secrets? Fine, make sure you only tell people you trust. Don't dare try to silence me if I find out about them.

P.P.S. Copyright law is currently protecting a lot of free software so its occasionally useful too.

I couldn't think of a good question in time for the interview, but I'd like to interject that this smacks strongly of Hakim Bey's works. I wonder if the authors were inspired in any way by his writings, particularly Bey's thoughts on what he terms "Temporary Autonomous Zones" (see also Bruce Sterlings _Islands in the Net_).

Does anyone else here see a connection? I am having difficulty putting my thoughts into words, so I'll let ya'll take over from here, if it seems relevant. have fun dongoodman

""Ian Clark is quoted on http://freenet.sourceforge.net as saying that he fears that his child may ask what happened to the freedom of the press on the internet. True freedom may have already been distroyed. Freenet is trying to get it back.""

"When has "true freedom" ever really existed? The fact is, there isn't a good-old-days that Freenet is taking us all back to. "

Freedom to say what you want without being killed or suppressed. Perhaps in the early days of the Americas. Usually you could get away with many things.

"Again, idealism is getting in the way of common sense. There is much more freedom of the press on the internet than there is in the conventional media, and Freenet's philosophy of turning a blind eye to specious content is not just irresponsible, but potentially dangerous to the whole issue of internet privacy. Once enough John Q. Public's get outraged by the stuff flying around Freenet, our beloved saviors in Congress will rally to the cause and take action. We've already seen several attempts like this regarding the internet in general, but if Freenet indeed makes this information flow that much more pervasive, then the chorus calling for restrictions will get only louder. "

Could you name me one way in which a person could totally shut down the concept of freenet. Assuming it gets off the ground to the extent you describe how would you be able to actually shut it down. Anonymous RSA say 60,000 bit+ keys, and untraceable in any way? Explain this to me because I would really like to know.

"I love it! I can trade mp3s, warez, pr0n, almost anything with anyone around the world! "

Anyone who chooses to run the client.

"Fortunately, this is not only a post-Microsoft, but a post-Copyright world. Copyrights are meaningless unless you have the ability to protect it. Sure, there are laws, but they don't mean anything to me. It's sort of like the Vice President: a nice sounding title, but basically worthless. Ok, your sound recording is copyrighted. Big deal. Try and stop me from sending to all my friends or making it available on FreeNet, Gnutella, or Napster. Heh. "

I don't believe you. Unfounded calls of revolution and such. Sounds like a really crappy version of the French revolution.

Speaking of the Vice President he actually does have power. He also has reputation. Plus he now is going to be featured in, many, many books when he is long dead. How's that for power. I doubt you could say the same.

"Same with software. While Slashdot has it's own trading boards, FreeNet makes it much easier to get the latest cracks for apps (like Corel Office 2000 for Linux!) or games (any Loki game: your choice (I like Civ:CTP, myself. Got it off FreeNet a while back)). This is what FreeNet really excels at. "

Slashdot does not sposor these "boards" and they don't actually store files. I doubt that you could trade files in this manner easily. I would like some actual proof.

Also you forgot to actually read the README file in the distribution. You don't have any anonyminity at all. Oops. I suggest you escape while the getting's good.

"Keep up the good work! Looks like "copys" ain't so "right", after all! "

The use of freenet is not to facilitiate copyright infringment but to facilitiate free speech. Your supposed ability to circumvent copyright is not a goal but a side affect.

There seems to be an underlying assumption that all people should have the rights to any work. This is right in line with a 5 year old's code of ethics. Everything that exists is mine.Ah yes, that must've been one of those "laws of physics" that I slept through during college. Get a grip - there's no "natural" law that enforces copyright. It's just a legal invention designed to encourage selfish people to use their creativity so that the rest of society can enjoy it.

"Ian Clark is quoted on http://freenet.sourceforge.net as saying that he fears that his child may ask what happened to the freedom of the press on the internet. True freedom may have already been distroyed. Freenet is trying to get it back."

When has "true freedom" ever really existed? The fact is, there isn't a good-old-days that Freenet is taking us all back to.

Again, idealism is getting in the way of common sense. There is much more freedom of the press on the internet than there is in the conventional media, and Freenet's philosophy of turning a blind eye to specious content is not just irresponsible, but potentially dangerous to the whole issue of internet privacy. Once enough John Q. Public's get outraged by the stuff flying around Freenet, our beloved saviors in Congress will rally to the cause and take action. We've already seen several attempts like this regarding the internet in general, but if Freenet indeed makes this information flow that much more pervasive, then the chorus calling for restrictions will get only louder.

Or the "Hillary Farias Date Rape Prevention Act" named after a girl who police said died from a drug overdose (GHB) even though it wasn't consitant with the evidence and a medical doctor who examined the case said otherwise. (anyone with more information on her case would be a great help...the web pages that had the info dissapeared when I checked them shortly after the bill passed...guess they gave up)

Luckily this bill hasn't had too much effect...all it has done is make posession, sale, or distribution" of red meat to any person without a licence to handle schedual 1 substances very illegal. (yes folks its true Red Meat is illegal in the US...mere posession of it could mean years in prosion)

Am I the only one bothered by the fact that we all have accepted that the FBI would try to stop the distribution of a document that US citizens have made "very popular." If its something we all want then we should have it.

2 points: 1:ever heard of the word "wireless" before? as soon as we can...

2:a much more likely reaction would be a reset of the infrastructure, with a black-hole list of nodes which are no longer trusted. remeber the hacker's manefesto? You can stop one (whether a node or a whole net), but not all.

Could you name me one way in which a person could totally shut down the concept of freenet.

As I recall, FreeNet is being implemented as its own protocol. While I, as a broadband customer, may want to implement a FreeNet node, my provider may be blocking that protocol at an upstream point.

So we fix that by encapsulating FreeNet traffic inside a VPN (IP Type 50, for example), to prevent this sort of attack (and raising the bar perhaps a bit more for people to create FreeNet nodes.

BEGIN HYPOTHETICAL SUPPOSITION Now let's say that I, as the member of the armed services of one of the world's largest nation-states am tasked with reducing FreeNet's effectiveness. What do I do?

Develop a simple app which can reside on any computer. This app will be given FreeNet indices and told to retrieve that data. This app is controlled remotely.

Install this app on every Windoze box in the military I work for, which happens to have (lots of) computers on most inhabited continents. We have enough machines that we have our own dedicate "InterNet."

To block copyright infringement, as soon as a new video/song/game comes out, post content-free (or, better, yet, trojanized installers for executables (see below)) binaries with the most likely indices. Notify the computers on my networks to go grab those, and vote them as "reliable". If someone beats me to the punch, have my machines vote them "unreliable."

* What to put in those trojans:

a notification program back to me via a covert channel (even, say, FreeNet:), notifying me of the downloader and their location.

A directory broadcaster that would notify me of the contents of that person's node (how else will I stay up to date with the latest and greatest indices in use?

This model has several strengths. First, it reduces the effectiveness of FreeNet to distribute illicit wares by inserting a significant amount of chaff into the environment. Second, it enables me to learn the locations of a large number of users of FreeNet, especially those engaged in illicit downloads. This will let (Censored - No Such Agency) have a good starting point on performing traffic analysis to determine the locations of the encrypted FreeNet nodes.

And once I have the locations of a significant percentage of FreeNet nodes, really, the system goes down. DDoS works nicely.

I left out many of the more useful things that I could do with the trojans, for obvious reasons.

The freenet info site is very enthusiastic about the idea that it is "almost impossible" to remove any information that has been posted to freenet. This, of course is supposed to be wonderful, because only evil people want info removed, and true freedom of speech means speech you "find distasteful" and all that.

So lets see....

Freenet becomes a large scale phenonenom. In addition to the predicted users, it has a fair amount of information on safe sex and abortion focused on teenagers. Prolifers attmpt to fight this by marking any information about abortion "untrustworthy", but the information still propogates.

An herbalist and naturapathic midwife posts information on how a healthy woman can safely induce abortion in the first trimester with certain herbal products taken internally and other solution used as a douche. Another naturapath who has contributed to Our Bodies Ourselves backs up the info.

Problem is, the natuarpaths don't exist. They are a single anti-abortion terrorist who figures that anyone planning on killing her baby should be hurt for it as much as possible. If you can't save the baby, give it it's revenge.

Concerned readers of all political persuasions attempt to correct the info, but all of that sort of info is "moderated down" and a number of teenagers in desperate situations try it. Some are hospitalized, one dies.

That's the hypothetical. My questions to all supporters of freenet are :

One thing that some of these people who say that FreeNet will be a huge child porn, warez, mp3, etc repository seem to forget that even within the existing internet, popularity *usually* governs the viewership of material. With the voting system of freenet that is even more true. It seems that FreeNet will be most accurately represented by its users. If it's filled with child pornagraphers, it will most likely be filled with such. If it isn't, then the occasional bit of objectionable material will eventually expire. The same goes for anything else. The same goes for warez and mp3's. The Internet began (not really at the beginning, but it blossomed) through community effort and opinion. Maybe freenet will bring back some of what the internet used to be.

Who is liable? by tcd004 You said that this: "allows information to be published and read without fear of censorship because individual documents cannot be traced to their source..." I'm all for an open forum for free speech, but this seems almost reckless. In most venues of speech, accountability for someone's words is fundamental. The Internet has opened up the possiblity of free speech without accountability to a small degree, and look at what has happened.

From a historical perspective, anonymity has played a vital roll in the creation of this country! All of the talk about porn and warez seems to be very US/UK biased. Think for a moment that maybe the benefits of FreeNet aren't for the democratic 1st world countries, but for every other country on this planet. Yes, kidde porn will be on it. Yes, warez will be distributed on it. But the social and political exchanges that would become possible far outweigh the porn/warez factor. Think outside the US circle. A while ago Slashdot posted a great article by Jonathan D Wallace, Nameless in Cyberspace: Anonymity on the Internet [cato.org]. It's a great piece on the historical importance of anonymity. Here's the intro:

Proposals to limit anonymous communications on the Internet would violate free speech rights long recognized by the Supreme Court. Anonymous and pseudonymous speech played a vital role in the founding of this country. Thomas Paine's Common Sense was first released signed, "An Englishman." Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, James Madison, Samuel Adams, and others carried out the debate between Federalists and Anti-Federalists using pseudonyms. Today, human rights workers in China and many other countries have reforged the link between anonymity and free speech.

IANAL. I know part of the CDA (Communications Decency Act) got tossed by the Supreme Court, but I am pretty sure that the part about transmitting Illegal or obscene material stuck. Even if not, every ISP acceptable use policy I have seen, has some clause in it to that effect. Bottom line, Freenet sysops can be held accountable for their transmissions by the Man and ISPs. I understand Freenet data is encrypted, supposedly to free the sysop from "knowingly" making transmissions. That ends as soon as a cease and dissist letter is issued to sysop, wherein they are put on notice that they are in fact transmitting illegal or "obscene" (whatever that means) material. Besides, I think that since the keys to the encrypted data are readily available, it would not require a law-equivalent of a Rocket Scientist(tm) to argue some type of negligance on behalf of sysops.

What I see is the bigger question, can common people enjoy the same type of immunity that the big telecom companies enjoy? Obviously, ISPs are never held accountable for forwarding warez, et.al. via usenet. My call on that is those with the deep pockets win.

Sorry I didn't have the opportunity to raise this issue at the appropriate time.

Could you name me one way in which a person could totally shut down the concept of freenet. Assuming it gets off the ground to the extent you describe how would you be able to actually shut it down. Anonymous RSA say 60,000 bit+ keys, and untraceable in any way? Explain this to me because I would really like to know.

Easy, the U$ Gov already has the mechanism in place, they just need to expand the authority. The FCC could be tasked with content control, as it is for other information mediums. Can you say "Liscensed Server"?

Don't think the FCC can control servers in Europe and elsewhere? Wrong. They would block any and all that don't comply. The FCC can be quite brutal. And how many wouldn't tow the line in order to get access to the U$ markets?

Give the U$ Gov enough ammo and you WILL see the Internet as you have known it squashed like a bug.

But not all speech is protected. Most of us would have serious moral qualms about helping in a kidnapping/murder, or in passing notes between a hitman and his client. Yet that's part of the payload that Freenet will carry, by allowing anonymous communications between hitman and client, or kidnapper and victim's family.

Well, sorry to break it to you, but this is true of the internet in general: you can anonymize mail any number of ways, some of them are secure, and any machine carrying public trafic is involved. Freenet is a change in scale, but not in kind as far as criminal or otherwise prejudiced communications go.

It's possible that the moral good in providing a safe haven for whistleblowers and oppressed peoples will outweight the blood from murder victims. This is the type of moral dilemma that keeps people up at night. Pretending that this type of crime won't occur doesn't help answer this question, and in fact it casts doubt on all anonymous schemes because it makes the proponents come across as shallow eggheads who don't fully comprehend the consequences of their actions.

The question is not whether this sort of crime will occur: it will. Criminals have for years been making use of the mode technologies of the day, and the internet is no different. Remember Sneakers? The Mafia's encrypted Information Systems Cray? It's just fiction, but the point is that Organized Crime has always adapted.

Is freenet really going to be so much more of a problem? We'll see, but I'm betting that it won't. The people who really have something to hide have been doing it sucessfully since the Cypherpunk remailer was launched, and so far I haven't heard of any kidnappings being brokered across that.

(Why do I feel the urge to quote Oppenheimer quoting Shiva after the first nuclear detonation?)

Firstly, it was Krsna, not Shiva.

Secondly, get a grip: freenet and it's successors are not the equivalent of a neuclear weapon for anybody except perhaps a few copyright holders - many may be significantly better off once we get those damn record companies and their publisher stooges off their backs. They may not think so now, but when we see hundreds of thousands of dollars of micropayments for music going straight into the pockets of the artists, rather than into the maw of corporate copyrighted america, we'll see which way the wind blows, eh?

I suggest you read our F.A.Q [sourceforge.net] where we address the issue of DOS attacks. Basically DOS is something which can affect any computer on the Internet, not just Freenet nodes (as we have clearly seen). Freenet is more robust than most systems since it doesn't make much difference if you bring down a small number of Freenet nodes using DOS or DDOS because Freenet is quite robust. As for inserting bogus information, the worth of information in Freenet is determined by the number of people who request it. Random data will only displace other data in Freenet if people actually request it (and it is not really possible to simulate requests for the data due to the dynamic caching mechanism).

Cars, computers, medicine, software, music, art. I was under the impression that *people* made these things, not corporations. A corporation is only a piece of paper (a charter). Open source shows that it's more than possible to exist without huge monolithic corporations.

No money? Definitely possible, western culture seems to be the only one that can't imagine society without a centrally controlled monetary system. On the other hand, who said that corporations are synonymous with money? You can get rid of corporations and still have an economy. You could even do vice-versa if you're ambitious.

If unpopular nodes get pushed out, doesn't that run contrary to the "free speech" dictum? Unpopular now means "kill the niggers", but 40 years ago, unpopular meant "I have a dream...". Popularity is a poor substitute for personal decision.

I completely agree. The most popular data is not necessarily the only important data. The First Amendment is all about the rights of the minority, and deleting little-used data is violating the spirit of free speech. I think that is an important issue.

"Freenet could be used by pedophiles and terrorists." Okay, this is kind of ridiculous. In a way, saying this makes it seem as though there are is a large army of child pornographers just waiting for an anonymous network.

Just like they were waiting for pencils, paper, cars, etc. Freenet is a tool and if people always focused on the horrible things a tool could be used for, we'de have a lot less tools, no?

1) Freenet adjusts availability of data based on use. If the vast majority of people using it want kiddie porn, then the kiddy porn will persist. If they don't, it will vanish.

Is the world crying out for a way to anonymously share information via the internet? YES! Many just don't know it. Far too many people won't feel their rights have been violated until it's far too late. Copyright violations? Breaking copyright is still illegal. If your business is using illicit software, it's STILL illegal. If you are in posession of banned material, it's STILL illegal. Leave that up to the community. FreeNET is simply a medium that is free of censorship as of NOW.

No, no. Not random. I am talking active hostile information warfare. The point of Freenet is to publish information that makes certain people, corporations and government very, very unhappy. Put 2 and 2 together yourself.

Actually, Freenet's goals go far beyond this. Freenet is a further refinement of cyberspace, another step towards the further seperation of it and the world of physical reality. The most obvious consquence is that one of the basic laws of cyberspace, "Information wants to be free", is a lot stronger on Freenet then it is on the Internet (as it is stronger on the Internet then it when information was carried in books and minds only), but it is far from the only consequence.

Pissing people off is not a goal within itself. The fact is that those people who would be pissed off by Freenet are those who do not want any Freedom in Cyberspace - and that are already threatening it on the web.

- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

Java is not ideal for writing daemons by a long shot (try sig-trapping), but it is a nice language for writing experimental code that is constantly changing. Unless a miracle occurs in the world of Java VMs soon, we will probably want to write a real Unix server in another language when/if we get things together correctly, but for now I'm glad we are using Java.

BTWx1, It will work with Kaffe, for those of you who don't want to use proprietary software.

BTWx2, I originally wrote the perl client because the text based protocol made it very easy. Perl's thread handling would probably make writing a Node with even a chance at being cross platform very difficult.

- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

In the US at least, one needs a targeted search warrant - the police cannot just invade your (virtual) house and look around for anything that might be illegal. Even aquiring a search warrant for kiddy porn and then booking you for warez is not legal.

In Canada, that is not the case:-( . But this protects the data stored on a node from being outright sifted.

Of course, the courts might decide that since the material is publicly available, this is equivalent to putting up pictures of kiddie porn on your front lawn.

Hoewver, due to the cacheing nature of the system, I can't see how you could be held liable for the contents of a filing cabinet you put on your front lawn, and then someone else starts putting illegal things into it.

In the end, I suspect that someone, somewhere will legislate against this sort of thing, but for now it will probably be legal.

The ideal here isn't about providing criminal content to whomever wishes it, but to allow a group of people who WANT to transfer info anonymously to do so.

Crime is everywhere, yet we don't have ID and papers check points on every street to stop criminal activities. But on the net there are tons of virtual id checkpoints and some people won't stand for it.

The world certainly isn't 'crying out for a means to anonymously share information,' as you put it, because they're happy with yahoo.com, shop.com, and cnn.com. There are people who have a great need and desire to exchange info anonymously, just because Joe "lowest common-denominator" Public doesn't want it doesn't make the project useless.

There are also bigger issues that this project serves, that anonminity doesn't equal criminality and illegal/legal doesn't equal wrong/right.

Eventually that information will not exist because it will not be avaible because no one in their right mind would requst random noise.

"(2) Targeted: let's say there is a Freenet file, e.g. '/us/politics/ClintonBlowsGoats' that you want to suppress. Just make your own file with the same net and inject it into Freenet. Again, use multiple launch points and repeat injection at will. Again, the bogus file will crowd out the "real" file very quickly. "

A read over the mailing list freenet-dev will show you that in fact these things are being addressed. If you feel the need to discuss these things with people who know sign up.

I think this is one of the first things that is being addressed.

"Note that the threat model for Freenet must assume that large corporations and governments will be trying to suppress info. It's clearly within reason for them to be able to inject false/misleading/random information into Freenet from 100s and 1000s of geographically distributed machines. "

There is no historic prcedent for information dumping and the like (I may be wrong). References?

"An accompanying problem is non-uniqueness of keys. There could be dozens of different info chunks floating around Freenet, each tagged with a '/foo/bar/qux' key. Which one you'll get depends on the node through which you access the Freenet -- not a very desirable dependency. Try to get the same thing a day later and you may well get a different info chunk for the same key. "

The server is supposed to prevent you injecting something with the same key. It is true that you will go along a different route to request the same data but the node may actually remain the same for a while.

"To summarize, this is a key vulnerability of Freenet -- it can be saturated with bogus/misleading information quickly and easily. "

This will eventually be addressed in it's full form. What I think is that despite the possibility for random information good information will always win in the end.

You might be able to say block information from someone you suspect to be an evil source of said information. Or you could filter information from requests on your node. That is entirely possible. Eventually the data will dissapear.

"The fact that Freenet will not just tolerate, but actually provide an easier means to anonymously distribute illicit material (copyright violations, kiddie porn, etc.) will be the doom of this project. "

I very, very, seriously doubt this in any way. The people who are doing the work are in disperate locations, and because of this access is difficult to curtail. Not to mention that even people like me are probably mirroring the data for no apparent reason. Doom censoring at all.

"Idealism can be a nice thing, but there is such a thing as focusing so strongly on a central idea that all perspective is lost. Is the world crying out for a means to anonymously share information via the internet? No, not really. "

Maybe not now but what about tomorrow? Ian Clark is quoted on http://freenet.sourceforge.net as saying that he fears that his child may ask what happened to the freedom of the press on the internet. True freedom may have already been distroyed. Freenet is trying to get it back.

The fact that Freenet will not just tolerate, but actually provide an easier means to anonymously distribute illicit material (copyright violations, kiddie porn, etc.) will be the doom of this project.

Idealism can be a nice thing, but there is such a thing as focusing so strongly on a central idea that all perspective is lost. Is the world crying out for a means to anonymously share information via the internet? No, not really.

Kiddie Porn is illegal not because of the speech, but because of the ACTIONS. Its deemed to be so abhorent that videos and pictures of it are illegal as well to, ostensibly, reduce the amount of real pedophila occuring.

Actaly, it seems to me that pictures and vidoe would be illegal because 1) the production of them is a crime (since it must involve the illegal actions) making distributers an accessory if the crime's main point was to make them money. 2) Except in narrow cases, you need a person's permission to distribute their image. Children cannot legally give that permission, and any parent who would in the case of child pornography would also be giving permission to rape their child and lose custody pretty damn fast. Therefore, if it is real images of a real child, it is automatically illegal to distribute, unless said child has reached the age of consent and is now making money by distributing the tapes taken into evidence of his/her own rape.

Frankly, I'm not enough of a free speech fanatic to think that this means that child porn cartoons or text descriptions are beyond any control, but thats another subject.

Sick thought of the day - what if the RealDoll company started making child dolls? Is there anything wrong with that?

Should the Methamphetamine Antiproliferation Act, as passed by the Senate, become law, it would exempt Freenet operators from Felony provisions of the Act, only until they had recieved written notices alledging violations of the statute's fuzzy definitions of online drug paraphernalia and manufacturing information.

The exemption, added just before the Senate closed for 1999, protects ISP and hosts, by turning them into forced agents of government censorship.

The House Judiciary is overdue on their touted hearings on this bill. I suspect its backers, including the Clinton admin, know it was in trouble, and are quitly reworking it.

Sure, this works, but only to the extent that people are willing to continue doing it indefinitely. Who's going to maintain the access points to keep flooding Freenet day-in and day-out? Who's going to go to all the trouble to find all the Freenet nodes and keep dinging them with bogus requests?

Freenet needs some sort of mechanism for blocking requests from hosts (and perhaps even entire domains) that keep pulling the same keys over and over. I believe they're working on that.

(2) Targeted: let's say there is a Freenet file, e.g. '/us/politics/ClintonBlowsGoats' that you want to suppress. Just make your own file with the same net

Aren't the keys hashed from the actual data in the file? It was my understanding that keys are unique, and so simple name substitution won't be an effective attack.

The Freenet site expresses some doubts about whether it's desirable (or even technically feasible) for Freenet to be easily searchable by document title or keyword. That's just not how it works.

The keys will be distributed through non-Freenet channels, in much the same way as people distribute PGP keys now: as e-mail and news.sigs, on WWW sites, etc. No one will request the bogus "ClintonBlowsGoats" file, because they'll be looking for it based on a key passed to them by a trusted source.

#1. Freenet is not cool, because you don't understand the language. Got it. They should have consulted you first.

#2. Java isn't as cross platform as perl? Hmm. Could have fooled me. My java apps run on my Windoze boxes (all of them), my linux box, my sparc, my mac, and the list goes on.... And with Perl, it's NOT fully cross platform. There are exceptions for every platform.

#4. How do you figure that a java runtime takes up so much space? It doesn't.

#5. We are developing something completely new, so why should we use a 'standard' protocol? There ISN'T a standard protocol that even comes close to matching what we want to do. By your logic, HTTP should not have been developed, and they should have just used a 'standard' protocol. Same for MySQL. They should use a 'standard' protocol too.

(2) Targeted: let's say there is a Freenet file, e.g. '/us/politics/ClintonBlowsGoats' that you want to suppress. Just make your own file with the same net and inject it into Freenet. Again, use multiple launch points and repeat injection at will. Again, the bogus file will crowd out the "real" file very quickly.

Note that the threat model for Freenet must assume that large corporations and governments will be trying to suppress info. It's clearly within reason for them to be able to inject false/misleading/random information into Freenet from 100s and 1000s of geographically distributed machines.

An accompanying problem is non-uniqueness of keys. There could be dozens of different info chunks floating around Freenet, each tagged with a '/foo/bar/qux' key. Which one you'll get depends on the node through which you access the Freenet -- not a very desirable dependency. Try to get the same thing a day later and you may well get a different info chunk for the same key.

To summarize, this is a key vulnerability of Freenet -- it can be saturated with bogus/misleading information quickly and easily.

But look at where things are headed. You can already be arrested for posting code to allow you to watch DVDs in whatever way you want, or to unveil the list of sites censored by a certain by a peice of software. You already have a web where people are trying to make it illegal to LINK between documents without permission, and where the little guy is dependent on corporate ISPs for hosting that are ready to throw him out at even the hint of legal trouble. We already have a world where content companies and next to forcing machines into your home with the expressed pupose of controlling you, and where it is illegal to work around those controls.

Maybe none of this concerns you now, but how long until it does? How long until something you want said pisses off some corporation and your ISP kicks you out. How long until you no longer want a Web covered in corporate plastic and littegation - a place controlled completely by the corporate interests, meant only to pump information into you without ever letting you have access to it. Things have gotten rapidly worse on the Web over the last year, and nothing seems to indicate that this has turned around.

And, if not for anything else, then a lot of (very normal) people are already trying to get around economic censorship (I'd bet even you are: have you paid your "existance of huge international recording conglomerate" fee for all your MP3s?) I'm not to happy about this being the main use of Freenet, because it is so bandwidth intensive, but the freedom of information is the freedom of information, no matter what the size is.

Freenet implements freedom. The sort of people who will fight Freenet are also the ones who are fighting freedom on the Web - where it is still possible without fighting the Web itself. If these people have the power and will to destroy all of Freenet (like you believe), then they definitely have the power and will to destroy freedom on the Web completely.

- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

Is the world crying out for a means to anonymously share information via the internet? No, not really.

Its nice to live in a free country where you can so easily say such a thing isn't it? The fact is that most of the peoples of this world live under the constant threat of governments that don't allow them to speak their minds, so its kind of hard for them demand such a thing. When you have freedom, you don't spend much time asking for it do you? There is a huge number of people that not only want the ability to this, but survival demands that they have it - but without it, they can't ASK FOR IT! Wonderful problem eh?

I can't even begin to count the number of times that I've gotten e-mail from persons in Singapore, China and other places thanking me for running an anonymous remailer and making it possible for them to do something, speak freely, that would otherwise get them killed. A right that you take for granted, which is actually quite rare.

Its all fine and dandy, in a free country, to say that people do not need anonymity to speak freely. "Put your name on it!" they cry, "only criminals need anonymity!", "what are you hiding?" and so on. Ignorance is bliss I suppose. When you have freedom, its hard to understand what its like to live in a country without it.

Never forget this: Most of the world does not have the freedoms that you enjoy. Is the world crying out for a means to speak freely and without the fear of reprisals? Yes they are... just not in public.-- Python

I have to say, I am very impressed with the level of dedication to freedom that the authors of Freenet have expressed. Let me address a few points that people have been making, though.

"Freenet could be used by pedophiles and terrorists." Okay, this is kind of ridiculous. In a way, saying this makes it seem as though there are is a large army of child pornographers just waiting for an anonymous network. Whether Freenet existed at all, pedophiles would still exist, and they aren't decreasing or increasing due to the internet. Pedophilia is a social and/or mental illness, and until you address that illness, FreeNet or not, pedophiles will still exist.

As for terrorists, who is a terrorist? Was Martin Luther King? The FBI thought so. What about Abbie Hoffman, or Gloria Steinem? Despite what people believe, our government is not terribly worried about the bomb-setting religious fanatics that they portray in the movies, they're worried about the peaceful anarchists [infoshop.org] and libertarians who feel that the real criminals reside in the oval office and/or attend stockholder meetings. Right-wing militia and hate groups are hardly ever bothered by the authorities until they commit a murder or assault. On the other hand, peaceful groups like Earth First! or Food Not Bombs are constantly hassled by police and the FBI, for "terrorist" behaviour such as blocking a bulldozer or giving away free food to the homeless.

I support FreeNet because hoping for a better future is a dangerous idea. I feel that it is necessary to have a medium where this dangerous idea can be spread without fear of incrimination.

"What about all the warez and mp3's?" What about them? More importantly, what about all the independant game developers and musicians and film makers that will now have a fantastic medium for spreading their work?

People need to do away with the idea that corporations are worth saving and protecting. We can do without them, especially the ones that are focused on making money off of the art and music of others. If the major labels all fail miserably because of MP3's, would it be a major loss? Honestly? What if in it's wake, a couple thousand indie labels started up? I not only do not fear that outcome, I anxiously await it.

I would like to help out any way that I can (I know perl, but not Java). I'll see how I can get involved.

I like the idea of FreeNet. Although porn in general doesn't interest me, it is all over the net. If I had the desire I could fill up my hard drive with the crap. I don't. But I don't curse the internet for having porn on it. The internet has good and bad things on it. I'm sure I can find many sites detailing how to create explosives. I haven't created any bombs in my basement.

The whole point I'm trying to make is that FreeNet is not giving us anything which isn't already on the net. But what it will give us is a way of keeping corporations from suppressing ideas. You can trust big brother AOL to properly filter your internet access, show you just what it wants you to see. If you wish to flame FreeNet for its disregard of copyright and its unconcern for the types of material it will pass, you must also treat the internet the same way. In essence they are the same thing in concept, just differ in distribution.

You may dissagree with me, but just point your browser to your favorite search engine and search for porn...or explosives...or warez. Its all out there. I personally am tiered of watching big companies try and tell me that they are doing all these things to protect thier interests. Why should my life be more complex because they need to add 3 more layers of bullshit to their product so its harder to pirate, but only slows me down.

There is good and bad to FreeNet, some will use it properly, some will not. If this disturbs you so bad then why are you on the internet? It holds the same nasty things you are complaining about. As for being annonymous...Any "free" web site is pretty annonymous. They will even give you a free email address.

"...(since Freenet will just cache it on a node right beside you, and all of your requests will be soaked up by it). "

But doesn't this then serve to identify the FreeNet node location?

Let's say there was a law passed against a certains kind of document (porn, political manifestos, whatever). Let's call such a document D. I'm the FBI looking for D. I have a suspect list already, so here's my procedure:

1) Identify the ISP of suspect S 2) Get an account with that same ISP 3) Fire up a FreeNet search for D 4) Repeat step 3 until I'm certain that D is cached on a FreeNet node nearby to me. 5) Beat down the door of S and search his hard drive for D. 6) Prosecute and repeat.

(this procedure might have to be changed depending on the definition of "nearby", but you get the idea)

Furthermore, there's another similar, potentially worse problem. Let's say D is very popular (like the Starr Report, for example). A LOT of people will be requesting it from FreeNet, so it will likely be cached on EVERY node. So the FBI doesn't even need a procedure: just port-scan at random and arrest anyone running FreeNet--if they run FreeNet they surely have the popular D.

Which leads to an EVEN WORSE situation: It doesn't really matter if there is a single popular D out there. There are many many D's. Surely one of them is illegal. Just bust every FreeNet node owner a priori--don't worry, you'll find something illegal once you do the (ex post facto) search. Can't happen? --

I already wrote a little bit about this in the Freenet FAQ [sourceforge.net] as Ian noted above. I'm not going to say that we are not worried about flooding attacks, because that would be dangerously vain, but on the other hand, we do have a system that is designed from the ground up to withstand them as well as possible. How well only time will tell, but I do believe that we are better off in this department then any other equivalent system.

Regarding the non-uniqueness of keys, that can be solved, at the loss of some convenience. The most simple solution is simply to index documents that you want to be able to have a unique address of with a hash of their contents as the key, and have the Freenet nodes enforce this relationship (there is a more complicated variant of this that uses digital signatures instead and would support updating data). Obviously, this sort of key could not be guessed, but it could be used in a link, or in an email, which is exactly the situation where it is important that the key be unique. The consensus among the developers is that we want to support both the current free type of key and this kind of key in the future.

We are aware of the technical problems that our network will face, and of course we cannot be sure that it will work. But nothing I have seen so far has convinced me, as pessimistic as I am, that it _won't_ work, which makes it worth trying in my book.

/Oskar Sandberg (The Freenet Project)

- We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

I'm amazed at the amount of hostility that Freenet is drawing from the Slashdot community. It's like it's hit some sort of a totally raw nerve and really separated the men from the boys (and the women from the girls, I suppose).

Get with it, people. Freenet is where the internet has been headed from the start. The technical issues (moderation, crypto) will be sorted out in time, and then we'll get to see what the future looks like because we'll have participated in it's creation.

If you can't handle it, pick up a shovel and cut your DSL line: this technological development has always been latent since the beginning of public key cryptography, and now it's here.